Chickens & Crops - Feeding ourselves AND our chickens For LESS!

for over five years now we've been experimenting with ways to incorporate growing perennial and annual crops within or chicken composting system for both our use and our chickens and in this video I'd like to talk about all those different elements five years in and how well they're working for us so please stick with us the really great news is that if you can get plants established within a chicken yard protected from the chickens scratching the roots and the soil away and from picking the young leaves they can become some of the absolute most vibrant brilliant beautiful plants in a whole system in fact this elder what you're looking at right behind me this has been in here for three years I cut it back nearly to the ground this last year this is the sort of regrowth that you can get from a well adapted plant within a chicken yard and the way we established this elder and this is the way we've done this with most of the shrubs within the chicken yard is when we planted it when it was teeny-tiny we simply put a 2 by 4 inch welded wire ring around the base of it and included flat stones around the outside of that let me show you what I mean here you can see a younger installation where I've got a pretty small height of 2 inch by 4 inch welded wire I like this as a default because it's inexpensive and it's easy to cut they're smaller numbers to cut and once it's in a ring it tends to hold itself up pretty well especially once it's pinned down with soil in this case we have a blueberry it's not exactly thriving in here I think because of the shade cast from this elder and pH imbalances but you can see the black currant behind it is doing just fine the idea is that the ring goes around the shrub that or tree you're planning to grow and you'll notice I put a rock or two on the inside so that a chicken's face which can reach through whilst he's not going to show you right now but they this way they won't Peck apart the leaves and the roots that are right next to the plant and if we put some stones right on the outside you can see here they're buried in soil but that keeps the chickens from scratch away and exposing the root system other than that the chickens are welcome to kick apart soil as much as they want above the stones and in fact we'll dump compost here periodically to feed the plants and encourage the chickens to be active but you'll notice there's almost no weeds in here and the plants are growing pretty well overall blueberry exception being I need to add some sulfur to help support it pH wise this area actually has a whole number of systems going on concurrently it's a great demonstration of various ways of incorporating annual crops that are on a rotation for our chicken so for example here we have now this is 1 inch by 1/2 inch this could be chicken wire this could be hardware cloth I happen to have this from air prune beds at I was building and a week ago if you can imagine this was sitting right here i seeded this out two turnip seed which I got for $2 a pound from a hardware store seated out this whole area it grew like this and then I simply moved this over a half foot and the chickens ate that apart so today what I can do is move this over this way and the chickens can eat this there's no reason why I couldn't go through and seed this out to wheat or more turnip it's a great opportunity to take the bolted lettuces the bolted kales broccolis let them make seed in your garden save that seed and be able to sow it out in containers like this the lid keeps them from being able to jump in and the smaller mesh keeps them from eating everything from the sides here we've got that same 2x4 welded wire fencing stock that i seeded out some sunflowers from their black oil sunflower seed bag which we get a 50-pound sack of for $20 so the seed is infinitesimally cheap the amaranth's that came up were simply in the soil from past composting that was here and the chickens can chew the leaves a bit as they grow the sunflowers being in the middle should be able to grow hi we'll leave those sunflowers in the fall to drop their seed feed the wild birds periodically shakes them out for our chickens and this is a great way to incorporate later feed for them so this is feeding them right now this will feed them in the fall [Applause] another design we found works well is that same 2x4 welded wire fencing taken laid flat and formed into a little bit of an arch with the sides folded over it's structurally pretty sound on its own the chickens can stand on the top a little bit here there they tend not to bend it and in this scenario I sewed out a whole lot more of the black oil sunflower seed and the chickens have been reaching through and picking whatever plants come up on the edges that's about as far as their faces can get in and the sunflowers can grow will guide them through these holes and that will help support them throughout the season and by the fall we should hope for some absolutely huge annual sunflowers dropping seed for our chickens and for the other wild birds perennial sunflower the Jerusalem artichoke helianthus tuberosa s-- is also quite compatible with the chickens this is providing them shade this is a crop that is both for our chickens and for us it's the roots we're after the chickens fertility absolutely makes huge huge tubers from this and in order to protect them from completely getting scoured out we've got fencing on one side and some short fencing right in here Sun chokes are so sturdy and so well adapted to begin with that even with lots of chicken scratching in fact they enjoy this one spot for using as a dust bath when it dries out even with all that scratching the sunchokes are able to expand every single year provide a ton of biomass food for us nursery stock for us and food for our chickens as well as most folks who follow this channel already know we feed our chickens mainly with food scraps this is a chicken composting operation but we supplement their feed with sprouted whole grains sometimes what we'll do is instead of just putting that out in a container for them for free choice we'll spread those sprouted or soaked grains into the landscape and by dropping again these rings around you can see here is wet red winter wheat a few days old protected from the chickens eating them directly now it's greened up into a little mini pasture for them you can see so much other grain that's here which of course they can just eat throughout the day but what I can do is to give them access to the fresh greens of this area it's as simple as taking this ring and moving it over a few feet so now this area can start to become green and lush and the chickens can browse this down and if we have these rings moving while continually adding sprouted seeds into such rich soil there'll be continual Pops of pasture all through the summer that could give them fresh greens just to the north of me is part of our living wall system we have some on the other side of the fence which we talked about in great detail in our living wall series which will link to but within the chicken yard we have shrubs and trees that are meant for our chickens consumption and for ours so what I'm looking at right here is one two three hazelnuts I put these in two years ago they're growing absolutely so fast and in fact this one is loaded with nuts for this year the hazelnuts we're interested in eating for ourselves and so the chickens are doing the work of fertilizing and weeding under them and the way we're protecting the roots in this particular area is by throwing old rotten mushroom logs so these were old shiitake logs once in a while they'll still put on a fruit that keeps the chickens from being able to chew away all of the soil that's in here and if we wanted we can move these once in a while to reveal more food for our chickens in the form of pill bugs and earthworms [Applause] there's slugs there's all sorts of other life in here so that's additional feed and then we can simply put that back flipped over to continue to protect the soil around the hazel now up until this spring these hazelnuts had these same standard rings we've been using extensively and I figured they're tall enough and well-established enough that they no longer need the Rings so this spring I slipped the rings up and over brought them to the south and sewed it with a mix of field Peas and sunflower which will feed our chickens later and in the fall we can add another layer to this perhaps honey berry perhaps black currants perhaps aronia the hazelnut is the dominant element within this hedgerow it is to the north things are packed like crazy in here but there's enough Sun and there's so much fertility that it feels like everyone's growing pretty well to the south and in-between the hazelnuts we've got a whole variety of currants both red and black now these we've got them growing in lots of different places these are for our chickens and normally we can pick them off and feed them to them that's kind of cute and it's a nice gesture but really the chickens love them when they've rotted enough to fall off the shrubs so the shrubs provide them with protection from the heat in the late day they give them shelter in an emergency scenario if there was a hawk coming through and free-choice fruit dropping a handful every hour or so over the next many weeks the more varieties of currants gooseberries Yassa berries honey berries that we have in here the longer the cropping window that there's a medicinal high quality fruit provided to our chickens in exchange for that fertility and weed protection and shelter from the Sun it's a really lovely exchange completely compatible with our chicken operation here a few years ago we added this cattle panel greenhouse or high tunnel to our chicken yard this is a four cattle panel greenhouse seven and a half feet wide 16 feet long or so and it's laid out on contour so that as water we're on a wet site as the water moves through the landscape after heavy rains or in the winter it can go through this channel in the center it'll pick up excess nutrient as it goes and this spring we set in locust staves with again two by four welded wire can you tell I like using this material we set it up high enough that the chickens can now come through here so after a rain we'll be water for a little bit and these beds are now filled with insanely rich compost I mean off-the-charts rich compost and that water can get wycked in the chickens keep it completely weed free in the on the ground here and in the beds for this season you can see tomatoes that are growing I don't know that I've seen healthy-looking tomatoes before they're really happy we've got a mesh for them to grow on those of you that grow tomatoes professionally can laugh a little at how poor our management is on the pruning it's not who we are that's for another video but the tomatoes are in here and lamb's-quarter all sorts of weeds so to speak pop-up we let them grow for a while and then as they get in the way of the tomatoes we can pull them and drop them to feed our chickens so it's acting as a living ground cover beautiful Ameren saw throughout there's even in the back a fig that over winter is here we're hoping to get some fruit from it this year and what I just realized today I see little wild birds coming and going from these high tunnels all the time fruit flies and other flying bugs accumulate in the ceiling during the hot time of day and the wild birds that you our nesting boxes around the edges of the property come and go and I think they're harvesting and managing these flies for us so they're getting fed by this system as well by and large our system for the chickens is centered around the idea of compost generation and compost consumption by our chickens but as you saw in this video there are many different ways to incorporate perennial and annual crops within a chicken composting system or a static chicken yard that are compatible with the chickens needs and our needs concurrently all while creating a lot of Beauty fertility and food and habitat for wild beings as well hopefully this video is useful to you please let us know what you think what are ways that you're incorporating food production medicines and fodder for your animals that works well for you and if you haven't done so please subscribe it be great to see you on the channel thanks so much [Applause]

Channel: EdibleAcres

Views: 336,103

Keywords: permaculture, chickens, permaculture chickens, backyard chickens, chicken, permaculture design, chicken tractor, permaculture research institute, chicken coop, raising chickens, backyard permaculture chicken coop, composting chickens, chickens permaculture garden, chicken house, chicken compost, chicken (animal), healthy chickens, urban permaculture design, permacuture, organic gardening, organic chickens, free food, free chicken food, free feed, free, diy

Id: fsr0rxYQOYs

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2019